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I suggest a weekly full backup and daily incremental or differential backups to backup any changes. If only interested in recovering data, then just backup E: drive regularly. If you lose C: then a regular ASR backup is good.

We run a Win2Kserver which has a system drive, and two extra hard drives. Our backup program does the following:

Mon-Thurs: Incremental backup, including system stateFri: Full Backup of everything.

The last full backup at the end of each month is taken off site.

Backups are made to a tape drive.

You must backup the system state every day, and you should make sure that the system partition is fully backed up at least once a week.

You should also ensure that any system data backup will replace the data exactly as it was sector for sector so that unmovable system files, and other program files which are required to be in a specific location are restored to their exact original locations on the drive.

This may seem like a silly question but i just trying to understand this. If the only thing on the C drive is the system ( OS )why is it important to backup the system partition? If your systems totally crashes don't you need to reinstall the OS anyway??

There is no comparison between recovering your system with ASR and recovering it using professional backup software.

ASR will only recover the files required to get your system started - that's it.

A full professional backup will restore your ENTIRE system partition.

Seems to me that if you rely solely on ASR you you need to spend quite a bit of time repairing and reconfiguring your system. After all, how much data can you fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk compared to a 40GB tape?

I've just been reading quite a bit about ASR and did not realise how different it is from similar options in earlier versions of Windows.

The only downside I can see with ASR is that you must keep it up to date, also, some of the pages I've read say it does not always work. Mind you, you can also say that about any type of backup.

I think that if I was in your situation I would have two copies of the ASR dataset (which apparently can be up to 2GB), one stored on a separate machine and one on removable media that can be stored off site.

By all appearances it looks just as good as a normal backup.

Maybe another member has actually used ASR to restore a server and can give you a better viewpoint.

Your server backups are the most important item you can have. Don't try to go cheap on this. Get a good solution, we use ArcServe, but there are others that are good as well. Do the research and spend the money, then do a FULL backup Mon-Sat. You only need one tape to restore from and it is the safest. There in good reason to skimp on your data backups.

Ah, ASR. such promise. such disappointment. it is practically vaporware, imho.it has so many bugs and gotchas that i would not rely on it in an emergency until i had tested the heck out it.for example, did you know that if you are planning on installing a new server due to a meltdown, with ASR you must have a hd with identical geometry to restore.also, you do not mention if this is domain controller or not. It matters.I would rely on ntbackup, not asr. both backup the system state, which is what you want. ntbackup appears more usable and flexible, imho. i would rehearse replacing the domain contrlloer. how exactly plan to recover depends imho on size of network. i believ you have asked the $64k question and i would set my homepage to support.microsoft.com and start a free email dialog with microsoft support about using asr in your configurtion.i would set up a lab with 2003 svr AD controllers and practice breaking and fixing and replacing it.from my rookie view, it looks to me like best way to truly cover backside is to have second AD server ('domain controller'). 2003 has lots built in to 'backup' ad functions to another 2003 svr. looks to me like made to fail pretty easy if you can throw another server in there...thx Bill.my current 2003 question is: how to i force the repair folder to update. where is rdisk? do i just hafta copy the config folder myself? how do i update my repair folder?you can pull off asr. it is just not a lead pipe since like it sounds in Help.so practice.

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